In my sparetime (what little of it there is), I'm working on a Machine Translation engine in Perl. What is that, you ask? Think babelfish. When I originally approached the project a year and a half ago, I decided to use Ruby. But over time, I realized it didn't have the power I needed.

Six months ago, I started over, in Perl. I've implemented most of the parsing, though I haven't written much of the grammar, and I'm working on the basics of the generator.

As far as others using perl in this area, there are two places to check. The first is fieldmethods.net, a /. type site (minus the trolls) for linguistics. Do a search for perl and you'll come up with a dozen articles, two of which are on the front page right now.

The second is comp.ai.nat-lang. A search there turns up some articles. You might also check comp.perl.ai.

Cool. Thanks a lot for the links. =) So what sort of linguistic model are you using for your engine?. Babelfish appears to be a mix of ideas, but a project with a similar name, Babel, uses HPSG (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar)

Speaking of Babelfish, I'm about to become famous, at least locally. The German radio show Wortlaut will at some point have a contribution from Max Schönherr, who did some interesting, funny stuff with Babelfish and Systran. Anyway, my colleagues and I are going to be on the show (reading stuff---don't want to ruin the surprise).

I dabble in Ruby myself, so I think you might not be giving it a fair shake, but really anything you can do in Ruby, you can do in Perl---just in a different way. Anyway, there is no Ruby Monks.

I'm a bit of an amateur at linguistics, but... I'm taking a top-down interlingual approach. That's about all there is to know, at least right now.

I think part of my beef with Ruby may have been that I didn't have enough experience in it. I've found Perl much easier though... especially when you get to difficult problems. Also, perl is quite a bit faster than ruby is.